Technical images

The world reflects the sun's and other rays which are captured by means of optical, chemical and mechanical devices on sensitive surfaces and as a result produce technical images, i.e. they appear to be on the same level of reality as their significance, What one sees on them therefore do not appear to be symbols that one has to decode but symptoms of the world through which, even if indirectly, it is to be perceived.

Vilém FlusserTowards a philosophy of photographyLondon Reaktion 2000

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Lexicon Of Basic Concepts (Decode)

Decode: demonstrate the significance of a symbol

Vilém FlusserTowards a philosophy of photographyLondon Reaktion 2000

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Structures Of Language

Languages are made-up systems constructed by man to encode, store and decode information. Therefore, their structure has a logic that visual literacy is unable to paralel.

Meaningful and Material

Like data, language works in several levels, endlessly flipping back and forth between the meaningful and the material. We can choose to weight it and we can choose to read it. There's nothing stable about it: even in their most abstracted form, letters are embedded with semantic, semiotic, historical, cultural, and associative meaning.

Semantics

When we call a thing 'unbelievable', we're expressing a belief that it's true. Similarly, we employ 'incredible' to confer credibility, and 'fantastic' to admit facts. We thereby put happy faces on mortifications of our common sense.

Peter SchjeldahlSeeing and Believinghttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/25/seeing-and-believing-the-art-world-peter-schjeldahl25 January 2015

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Linear Rationality

Insofar as text usually presented in a linear left to right fashion, that particular medium encourages, or at least is particularly well adapted to, the expression of rational thought, which results in an informative effect. McLuhan wrote that the mental process for writing a word entails putting the letters in the proper sequence to form a word, a process that led to the development of western science, technology and rationality.

Barbara VerityThe relationship between text and image in documentary photography https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/5298/1/ML49062.pdf15 November 2015

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A Thousand Words

We know that a single picture is worth a thousand words. But how do we know which words any given picture is worth?

Marcia EatonTruth in pictureshttps://www.jstor.org/stable/429915?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents23 November 2015

Linear Structure

[T]he legacy of the photographic linear narrative stretches back to the nineteenth-century magic-lantern slide show that required a sequential parade of images, and remains entrenched today in the slide shows that proliferate on magazine and newspaper websites. But these straight narratives are beginning to age out in a dynamic online environment that feeds on shared information that continues to evolve after publication. Online imagery is centered less on presenting photographs as objects of memory and more on the sharing of current experience. Pictures are endlessly streaming and reflect the messy realities of life as it’s lived. [...] Professionals no longer define the aesthetic and functions of our image culture—the vernacular is the vanguard—but that does not mean professionals can’t avail themselves of these new modes.

Stephen MayesToward A New Documentary Expressionhttps://aperture.org/blog/toward-new-documentary-expression/

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A Viewer Notices Many Things, But No One is Defining

Tillmans' ability to make abstract photographs that capture foreign environments and the experience of being in them is key. The non-specificity of these images, which at first is a challenge for viewers, allows them to mirror the experience of being somewhere crowded with stimuli. A viewer notices many things, but no one is defining. Tillmans duplicates this experience with his arrangements of relativity abstract photographs. He democratizes the images and leaves the viewer unsure of what to focus on.

Invitations to Speculations

The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: There is a surface. Now think - or rather feel, intuit - what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way. Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy.

Adam Broomberg & Oliver ChanarinUNCONCERNED BUT NOT INDIFFERENThttp://www.broombergchanarin.com/text-unconcerned-but-not-indifferent/11 December 2015

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The Tail of Reality

Photography is a weird practice of trying to catch the tail of reality. But in the end you stay only with the tail. And this tail, a photograph, starts its own life, loosing its origins. Photography is not equal to reality at all.

Irina PopovaLAPhttp://livingarchiveproject.com/#introduction

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Ambiguity

[A] photograph leaves greater freedom for the eye to roam in any direction over it's surface in search of what to focus on, making an aesthetic response more possible because of the freedom allowed in the mind of the observer. Accompanying this freedom however, is the element of ambiguity.

Barbara Verity The relationship between text and image in documentary photography https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/5298/1/ML49062.pdf28 November 2015

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Sol LeWitt 1971Wall Drawing #118

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Ownership

In the literary sphere, especially the academic literary sphere, long-established writing practices and notions reign supreme. Poets who aim to see their work in “high culture” publications understand that a certain type of profound, unmetered lyric is the way to go. A good piece of fiction follows a slant bell-curve, and a great piece of fiction does this while also providing an underlying commentary on the contemporary sociopolitical climate. The five- paragraph essay is simultaneously scoffed at and preached; only writers who are notable enough should venture to break structure. Those with less notoriety are better off sticking to the formula and providing plenty of cited affirmation from those well-respected in the academic arena. Here it is seen how in the literary apparatus, more so than in any other, there is a strong sense of ownership—of words, structure, ideas.

Massaging Texts

At first the Internet was entirely text-based. I began using the Internet in 1992, with the Lynx browser. I was overwhelmed by the amount of language available. At the time, I was writing "No. 111" and had been for a year prior to getting on the web. As soon as I discovered the Internet, my book began to write itself. Typing was no longer necessary, just copying and pasting. Instead of editing, we now massage our texts.

Kenneth GoldsmithI look to theory only when I realize that somebody has dedicated their entire life to a question I have only fleetingly considered (a work in progress)http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/goldsmith22 October 2015

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Symbionts

Rather than natural enemies, narrative and database are more appropriately seen as natural symbionts. Symbionts are organisms of different species that have a mutually beneficial relationship. For example, a bird picks off bugs that torment a water buffalo, making the beast's existence more comfortable; the water buffalo provides the bird with tasty meals.

Everything that is solid melts into air

At dinner in Vancouver, Mancuso said, “Since you visited me in Florence, I came across this sentence of Karl Marx, and I became obsessed with it: ‘Everything that is solid melts into air.’ Whenever we build anything, it is inspired by the architecture of our bodies. So it will have a solid structure and a center, but that is inherently fragile. This is the meaning of that sentence—‘Everything solid melts into air.’ So that’s the question: Can we now imagine something completely different, something inspired instead by plants?”

Stress Detection in Plants

The experiments carried out in these case studies measure the plant’s stress level when put under potentially damaging conditions. Each plant was exposed to different circumstances: chlorine, hydrochloric acid, boiling water, drought and root absorption of vinegar. Plants always emit fluorescence, but when a plant is under stressful conditions the fluorescent emittance increases. This fluorescence is invisible to the human eye. This means, if we could see beyond our limited visible spectrum, plants would appear to us as glowing organisms, directly responsive to their environment.

Bacteria

Bacteria communicate with our cells, telling them about a world 'out there', a chatter of which we are very little aware, not to mention the resonances of all matter in the world, constantly humming to every part of our bodies, the boundaries of which thus dissolve, because we are also resonance, a cloud of microbes, energy, smell and light.

Bottom Crawlers

If the creatures of the deep could study us as we study them, they would probably think our waterless habitat is impoverished, barely capable of sustaining life. Exposed to extremes of lights and temperature, we are mere bottom crawlers, gravity's prisoners, condemned to live on two dimensions of the floor of our atmospheric sea.

Elise Swerhone2010One Ocean: Mysteries of the Deep

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Narrative

Narrative: An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them; a narration, a story, an account.

OEDNarrativehttps://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/narrative11 November 2015

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The Spirituality of the Researcher

Archaeology is the study of the past through the analysis of physical remains – but that’s only the technical definition. Archaeology is also about the present. Where scientists go, what they dig up, what they keep, and how they interpret are all inextricably linked with their own ideas about the world. When archaeologists dig up religious sites, the spirituality of the researcher can influence his or her approach to the work.

Rose EvelethRock of ageshttps://aeon.co/essays/is-archaeology-better-off-without-religion13 September 2015

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A Sun gazer's Letter

Dear Mason,

First of all, I would like to thank you for changing my life. I've experienced no hunger or thirst for weeks now. My grades in school have increased to the point that actually I'm thinking of dropping out to pursue a life of enlightened thought. My parents think I am crazy. I don't think I really even need them anymore at least now that I've got sungazing to take their place. I do have a few questions however. What happens if it is raining. Can I watch a videorecording of the sun? Can sungazing enhance sexual performance? What type of incense do you use? I tried to get my dog to sungaze with me. It seemed to be working great for weeks, until I stopped feeding him. Do you even feel superior to the rest of the world?

I sure do.

Peter Sorcher2011Eat The Sun

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Leonardo da Vinci

The eye, which is the window of the soul, is the chief organ whereby the understanding can have the most complete and magnificent view of the infinite works of nature.

Steven R. PritzkerEncyclopedia of CreativityUSAcademic Press1999

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Better Lenses

One possible corrective might be to modify the way we teach science. Currently, our insights are communicated as a catalogue of Things We Know, which has the dual disadvantage of not only making science seem a laborious exercise in memorisation, but also giving the false impression that our knowledge is petrified and immutable, a Cretaceous-era insect entombed in amber. Maybe, instead, we should teach science as an exciting examination of Things We Don’t (Yet) Know. Denied the comforting blanket of illusory permanence and absolute truth, we have the opportunity and obligation to do something extraordinary: to see the world as it is, and to understand and appreciate that our images will keep changing, not because they are fundamentally flawed, but because we keep providing ourselves with better lenses. Our reality hasn’t become unstable; it’s just that our understanding of reality is of necessity a work in progress.

David P. BarashParadigms losthttps://aeon.co/essays/science-needs-the-freedom-to-constantly-change-its-mind13 January 2016

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The Great Escape

Do our fantasy worlds, then, help us to escape, not from reality, but from our own limitations? Is it possible that we might bring back from our escapist adventures a renewed sense of our own power and creative potential as human beings? In a world that demands ever more of both, this could the highest function of escapism, and the calling that we should demand of it.

Damien WalterThe great escapehttps://aeon.co/essays/does-fantasy-offer-mere-escapism-or-real-escape28 February 2016

The Space Constructed by Scanning

While wandering over the surface of the image, one’s gaze takes in one element after another and produces temporal relationships between them. It can return to an element of the image it has already seen, and ‘before’ can become ‘after’: The time reconstructed by scanning is an eternal recurrence of the same process. Simultaneously, however, one’s gaze also produces significant relationships between elements of the image. It can return again and again to a specific element of the image and elevate it to the level of a carrier of the image’s significance. Then complexes of significance arise in which one element bestows significance on another and from which the carrier derives its own significance: The space reconstructed by scanning is the space of mutual significance.

Vilém FlusserTowards a philosophy of photographyLondon Reaktion 2000

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Image and Text

Both media involve choice and de-coding. As the eye scans either a line of text or the surface of a photograph, choices are made of what word or group of words to give priority and what part of the photograph to focus on. The mind is also constantly de-coding symbols. While reading, the mind is finding meaning in the letters and words of the text. And while looking at a photograph, the mind is making sense of all the elements seen in the photograph. Our experience of our environment is one guide - a specific form and a series of certain lines tells us we are looking at a picture of a chair. Or in reading, the letters c-h-a-i-r make us think of a chair. Our experience of our culture is another guide - a written description or a photograph of a decorated evergreen tree tells us of Christmas. Pictorial structure is a conventional language that must be learned as a skill, like reading.

Barbara Verity The relationship between text and image in documentary photographyOttawaNational Library of Canada1989

Fire! Fire!

Ironically, not even a verbal message is coded, only the means of conveying it. Words are discontinuous signs, reasonably well standardized, but the message they transmit consists in the image that induced the sender to verbalize and is resurrected by the words in the mind of the recipient... What comes across when a person hears 'Fire! Fire!' neither consists of two verbal units nor conveys a standardized image.

Rudolf ArnheimNew Essays on the Psychology of ArtBerkeleyUniversity of California press1986

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Definition of Imagination

The capacity to bring to mind images, the 'forms' of traces of more or less implicitly visual sensations retained from the past in the 'thesaurus' or memory.

Carla SwertsReal Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism London Phaidon Press Limited 2003

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Individu

Geen enkel individu staat los van alles: “even before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent in the story recounted by those around him, in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course”. Met andere woorden, het narratief dat men koppelt aan data is verbonden met de eigen standplaats.

Shaping Each Others Memories

Disputed memories seem to be an example of how the content of our memories can be affected by the stories that other people tell. Just as a parent can instil false memories in a child, so family members can shape each other's remembering. It's not only siblings who can relate such compelling memories that we start to have them for ourselves.

The Mockingbrain

The word “illusion” derives from the Latin illudere, “to mock,” whereas the word itself has roots in 14th-century Anglo-French, meaning an act of deception. That's because our brain—not our eyes—is the final arbiter of “truth.” We are wired to analyze the constant flood of information from our senses and organize that input into a rational interpretation of our world. Much of the time our brain decodes those signals correctly. But illusions derail the process—although our sensations may seem to be accurate, our perceptions are not.

Eye/Brain Duet

here is a mysterious alchemy involved in what we call normal sight, the well-functioning eye/brain duet. Every human eye has a blind spot near the center of the visual field. This is not about peripheral vision or a view from the margins. It is right at the center of experience. The eye does not know its own blind spot, mistakes it for vision. Nor does the mind’s eye and so gives meaning to what is not really there. Every human brain fills in what is missing, blinding each of us to our own blind spot. A human paradox, each of us sees where we cannot and do not. The mind is positive that it sees what is really there. [...] Of this personal vision, a worldview is born and an entire life lived. Yet the center does not hold because it does not even exist. Right in the middle of each person’s universe is a big dark chasm into which each of us must inevitably tumble again and again unnoticed and unnoticing.

Mutually Reinforcing

Texts admittedly explain images in order to explain them away, but images also illustrate texts in order to make them comprehensible. Conceptual thinking admittedly analyzes magical thought in order to clear it out of the way, but magical thought creeps into conceptual thought so as to bestow significance on it. In the course of this dialectical process, conceptual and imaginative thought mutually reinforce one another. In other words, images become more and more conceptual, texts more imaginative.

Vilém FlusserTowards a philosophy of photographyLondon Reaktion 2000

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A Ream of Paper

Kenneth Goldsmith’s Theory offers an unprecedented reading of the contemporary world: 500 texts – from poems and musings to short stories – printed on 500 pages assembled in the form of a ream of paper. Curated by the author-poet, this unique collection maps out the various issues and trends in contemporary literature in a world currently being shaken up by everything online and digital, and calls for the reinvention of creative forms.

The Other RoomKenneth Goldsmith: THEORYhttps://otherroom.org/2015/06/28/kenneth-goldsmith-theory/21 January 2015

Brain Poetry

Brain Poetry (2013) is a poetry generator, which produces poetry from the user’s brain waves. The technology behind the generator is based on methods of computational creativity developed by researcher Jukka Toivanen. The artwork examines the combination of a human and a machine in a creative process. Computational creativity means imitating, modeling and aiding creativity with a computer. The artwork deals with issues of creativity in science, as well as the opportunities of technology in this field. It questions the way we see the art and the science as opposites. The poem generated from user’s brain waves varies individually. Brain Poetry proposes a new perspective to the human-machine relationship.

Florida sinkhole

Florida is plagued by sinkhole erosion, but this disaster in 1994 was one of the most devastating by far. A 15-story sinkhole tore open right beneath an 80-million-ton pile of gypsum stack (toxic industrial waste). The hazardous soup contaminated 90% of Florida’s drinking water and cleanup efforts ran into the millions of dollars. The 2 million cubic foot hole soon was nicknamed the “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, as if to indicate that it was the newest Disney World attraction.

Game of Concepts

An image is not an autonomous and isolated empire, a closed world without communication of its surroundings. Images, as words, as everything, cannot escape their interference in the game of concepts which regulate meaning in society.

Hollow Earth

In 1947 Admiral Byrd would have given the first scientific evidence of a Hollow Earth. A “lost” diary reports that the explorer went on a mission to fly over the North Pole. It was not his first trip there. Actually, Byrd was the first person to fly over the North Pole in 1926. This second time, however, he discovered the entrance at the north poles and flew through the hollow earth where he observed other civilizations and enormous herds of giant mammoths. Another expedition in 1956 would have located the second entrance in the South Pole. The U.S. government kept the discovery secret and didn’t allow anyone to cross the pole anymore which, obviously increased rumors of a conspiracy.

Will StorrHollow Earth conspiracy theories: the hole truthhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10961412/Hollow-Earth-conspiracy-theories-the-hole-truth.html11 October 2015

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Near-Dead

Dallas Thompson was a former personal trainer who had spent his youth in Hawaii but now lived in Bakersfield, California. His life had changed forever following a terrible accident, five years earlier. He’d been driving along Highway 58 during heavy rain when his car had aquaplaned, spinning four times, only to plunge backwards down a 250ft drop. When Thompson was found, the roof of his blue Honda Accord had been crushed almost to the floor. The fireman who rescued him was amazed he hadn’t been decapitated. As he’d been sitting, helpless, in the wreck, Thompson had had a vivid near-death experience. He claimed to have seen a “light so bright that it burnt my eyes” and made him “legally blind” and to have had bizarre knowledge about the world poured into him. When he regained consciousness, he was convinced that the Earth was hollow and had an opening at the North Pole.

Will StorrHollow Earth conspiracy theories: the hole truthhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10961412/Hollow-Earth-conspiracy-theories-the-hole-truth.html11 October 2015

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The Role of the Narrative

Whereas the role of narrative is declining, the role of archive, in a variety of forms, is increasing. As the artworks discussed here suggest, the archive has become the dominant symbolic and cultural form.

Ernst van AlphenStaging the Archive, Art and Photography in the Age of New MediaLondon Reaktion 2014

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Online Universe

The role of the ancient storyteller wasn’t to relay facts but to impart greater truths: archetypes, emotions, political structures and the nature of human experience. It’s only recently that we’ve conflated storytelling and factual reporting, but twentieth-century conventions are dissolving rapidly as photography explodes into the online universe […] Photographers are no longer constrained as humble suppliers to platforms managed and controlled by others; thinking as publishers allows them to choose their themes, audiences, and the means of expression and distribution. How we grasp the opportunities before us become partly a matter of problem solving and, more significantly, a challenge of imagination.

Stephen MayesToward A New Documentary Expressionhttps://aperture.org/blog/toward-new-documentary-expression/21 October 2015

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Saturated Knowledge Becomes Democratic

Here we can start to see how the Web could be seen as one of the worlds most glaring actualisations of rhizomatic knowledge. The internet is in fact inherently rhizomatic in structure: it contains many different nodes that have shoots and connections to a seemingly infinite number of other nodes. Nodes can be be thought of as the pages of the web, or the links of hyper text. In the rhizome, and in the internet, there is no central structure but an infinite number of interlocking nodes, many of which are produced from a bottom up, grass roots system that allows for each individual to have a have a voice. Knowledge becomes saturated, but in doing so becomes democratic, or even anarchistic in nature.

Matt BlueminkThe Web as Rhizome in Deleuze and Guattarihttp://bluelabyrinths.com/2015/07/15/the-web-as-rhizome-in-deleuze-and-guattari/28 September 2015

The Rose is Red

notes that propositions like “the rose is red” are fundamentally irrational because after a time the rose withers and becomes brown, thereby violating the principle of identity and contradiction. The statement, the rose is red, is true at one time and false at another. Plato thereby declares that the physical world we live in cannot possibly be true, that it can’t be the real world, for it is contradictory and fails to meet the demands of reason. Only the eternal, that which is unchanging and therefore always identical to itself and never characterized by contradiction, Plato says, can be true.

Re-Drawing Maps

The quest for universal understanding goes on. But the scale changes, and the perspective shifts. What’s happening now is in many ways similar to what happened a few centuries ago when people were exploring the planet: They kept discovering they lived in a wider world and re-drawing their maps. If you read a history of that adventure you can see an ongoing process, cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction.

Interactivist Ontology

A flower turns towards the moon and begins to bloom late in the night. A glass mug shifts between different shades of blue, going all the way to black, depending on whether it’s viewed under harsh fluorescent lights, natural sunlight, candlelight, or in a dark room. Our bodies swell in extreme heat and contract when it is bitter cold. A person’s helmet cracks and they scream in the unimaginably cold reaches of outer space, yet no sound is emitted for there is no air to carry the waves stirred by their vocal cords beings are being with, ecological, and interactive.

Levi BryantKnots: For an Interactivist Ontologyhttps://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/pdfbryantswedeninteractivism2015.pdf. 21 November 2015

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Both Open-Ended and Specific

Instead of executing the works of art himself, LeWitt comes up with an idea or plan for his art, usually a set of simple instructions—sometimes with line drawings. He then hands over the written plan to his assistants, and they construct the work. LeWitt’s instructions are both specific and open-ended so that the resulting work of art varies according to the interpretation made by the draftsperson producing the work of art.

National Gallery of ArtSol LeWitt’s Concepts and Structureshttp://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/education/teachers/lessons-activities/new-angles/sol-lewitt.html12 October 2015

Object Oriented Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, DVD players, cotton, bonobos, sandstone, and Harry Potter, for example. In particular, OOO rejects the claims that human experience rests at the center of philosophy, and that things can be understood by how they appear to us. In place of science alone, OOO uses speculation to characterize how objects exist and interact.

The Dew Lab Introduction to Object Oriented Ontologyhttp://www.thedewlab.com/blog/2012/07/12/introduction-to-object-oriented-ontology/18 November 2014

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Plant are the Great Symbol of Modernity

[F]or Mancuso plants hold the key to a future that will be organized around systems and technologies that are networked, decentralized, modular, reiterated, redundant—and green, able to nourish themselves on light. “Plants are the great symbol of modernity.” Or should be: their brainlessness turns out to be their strength, and perhaps the most valuable inspiration we can take from them.

How to Publish the Best Lies

At the New England Journal of Medicine, the editor once took me through their back archives and he said, ‘You know what? Almost every single thing that was published in the year 1959 is now a lie. All we are trying to do is to figure out how to publish the best lies.

Bob Arnot as cited by Jerome Aumente A Medical Breakthroughhttp://ajrarchive.org/Article.asp?id=125818 september 2015

Herman de RegtWaarom is wetenschap belangrijker dan nadenken over de zin van het leven?https://universiteitvannederland.nl/college/waarom-is-wetenschap-belangrijker-dan-nadenken-over-de-zin-van-het-leven-311 September 2015

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Proof

Sofi, I believe in proof. There is no proof that there is some magical spirit...uh, that’s invisible, living above us, right on top of us...
How many senses do worms have?
They have two: smell...and touch.
Why?
So...they live without any ability to see or even know about light, right? The notion of light to them is... unimaginable.
Yeah.
But...we humans... we know... that light exists... all around them, right on top of them. They cannot sense it, but... with a little mutation, they do. Right?
Correct.
So...Dr. Eye... perhaps some humans...rare humans...have mutated to have another sense...a spirit sense...and can perceive a world that is right on top of us... everywhere...just... like the light on these worms.

Moviescript I originshttp://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=i-origins12 September 2015

Antlers

Thomas Jefferson incorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and induced his New Hampshire friend General John Sullivan to send twenty soldiers into the northern woods to find a bull moose to present to Buffon as proof of the stature and majesty of American quadrupeds. It took the men two weeks to track down a suitable subject. The moose, when shot, unfortunately lacked the imposing horns that Jefferson had specified, but Sullivan thoughtfully included a rack of antlers from an elk or stag with the suggestion that these be attached instead. Who in France, after all, would know?

Bill BrysonA Short History of Nearly EverythingBroadway BooksBroadway Books2005

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Giant Tortoises for Dinner

It took 300 years for the giant tortoise to get a scientific or taxonomical name because people kept eating them. People would put them on ships and sail them back home, but by the time they arrived at port in Europe the crew would have eaten the whole lot. Even Charles Darwin and the crew aboard the Beagle ate all the giant tortoises on board. The only descriptions of them are comparing them to chicken, beff, mutton and butter, and saying they tasted better than all of them. Even the liver and bone marrow was considered delicious. They were also used as water stores, because they have a special internal bladder which stores water so perfectly that it is drinkable, so when you slit them open to cook them you also got a gallon of fresh water. The crew therefore stacked them up so that they could not move, and they did not need to be fed for months so they were very useful for whaling ships because they provided both food and water.

Lexicon of Basic Concepts (Reality)

Reality: what we run up against on our journey towards death; hence: what we are interested in.

Vilém FlusserTowards a philosophy of photographyLondonReaktion2000

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Lexicon of Basic Concepts (Code)

Code: a sign system arranged in a regular pattern

Vilém FlusserTowards a philosophy of photographyLondonReaktion2000

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The Edges of Exploration

The 39-year-old Fischer, who lives in Oakland, developed his cartographic interest while at the University of Chicago, when he came across the windy city’s 1937 local transportation plan. (It was a “clearly insane plan” to replace the transit system with a massive freeway network, he recalls.) Until a few weeks ago Fischer worked as a programmer at Google, gathering the data that guides his projects in his spare time. “It’s a simple concept, but revealing about where the edges are where people turn back and stop exploring,” says Fischer.

Eric Fisher as cited by Eric JaffeMapmaker, Artist, or Programmer?http://www.citylab.com/design/2012/08/mapmaker-artist-or-programmer/3132/11 November 2015

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Black Dot

An 1840 edition of Alexander Humboldt’s Cosmos rendered blank by chemical process, and the extracted ink turned into a miniature.

Pale Blue Dot

Original Caption Released with Image: This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager’s great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.

Database

Uniformity

Conceptual writing, however, recognizes originality and propriety as farces, and thereby serves as an equalizer. When tradition holds power, change cannot happen and uniformity sets in. What’s worse is that uniformity is presented under the guise of acceptable creativity and is touted for its supposed originality. Every year, thousands of high school students are told to write a five-paragraph essay delineating the rhetorical devices in a given letter, speech or proclamation, and every year, those students are patted on their backs and rewarded with good grades for turning in essays that each have the same format, the same content, the same ideas as their classmates as well as every student before them who was given the same assignment. In academia, there are implicitly right and implicitly wrong answers that help ensure the continuation of a certain status quo, so it is acceptable, even desirable, to do what everyone else is doing. Because this method has a favorable outcome for tradition, this uniformity is not considered plagiaristic and is instead regarded as acceptable, though perhaps milquetoast, originality.

Tradition

Why is it that there is such a strong insistence on tradition within the writing and academic communities? Especially in today’s internet-based environment, where notoriety comes from how many times a given thing—a video, a sentence, a photo meme—is shared, repeated, or rendered, and the originator becomes lost to the fame of the object itself, it seems that long- standing traditions are growing rapidly archaic. Practices that are unacceptable in academia and amongst the literary elite have been regarded as relevant and legitimate not only to artists, musicians, and filmmakers, but to everyday people as well.

Infinte

Grandmothers share (unattributed) stories on their grandchildren’s Facebook pages; a picture on Tumblr has a string of usernames underneath to showcase those who have reblogged it; people all over the world retweet 140- character thoughts and share the same ideas in order to get topics that are interesting or important to them to trend; everyone from bodybuilders to Trekkies to students and even their teachers indulge in the subtle art of the meme, whose name stems from mimema, the Greek word meaning “something imitated”. And why not? Humans are naturally mimetic. Reacting to and reciprocating one another’s behaviors helps us relate. To make the issue even more timely, we are now at the point where we have endless content to borrow, manipulate, and share. There is a constant flow of readily available text to take and use, so it seems that recycling is a pragmatic gesture. How many new thoughts can actually be expressed? Few, if any. But how many can be re-expressed, re-viewed, and put into new light, given new context and perspective? Infinite.

Fabian Bürgy

There is a tension in his work, or a feeling of being unsettled, but the feeling is not so uncomfortable it can’t be enjoyed. Bürgy is able to straddle many contradictions – stillness and movement; familiarity and strangeness; function and non function; real and virtual.

GenisteNot Just Black And White: Fabian Bürgy’s Installations Trick The Eye And Deceivehttp://beautifuldecay.com/2015/06/09/just-black-white-fabian-burgys-installations-trick-eye-deceive/16 November 2015

The Teddy Bear Project

Because of the relative rarity of photographs that include teddy bears, the resulting multitude of over three thousand pictures provides a curatorial statement that is both true and misleading. Viewers are inclined to trust a curator’s presentation of cultural artefacts. While these systems are not necessarily objective, they can be convincing and therefore of comfort.

Ydessa HendelesNotes on exhibitionhttps://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/2017077/71165_10_.pdf17 November 2015

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Active Agents

This paradigm shift takes distance from viewing archival records as static physical objects or passive products of human or administrative activity. It understands such records now as having radical consequences for the self-image of archivists. They are no longer the passive guardians of an inherited legacy. They are now seen as active agents who shape cultural and social memory. Whereas archivists were until recently information technologists embracing the notion of the archive as a neutral, even mechanical accumulation of information, now they have become cultural analysts conceiving the archive as storage of information as well as as a source of knowledge and power essential for social and personal identity.

Parallel Encyclopaedia

The result of a long term investigation, this voluminous encyclopedia of Batia Suter contains solely images collected from other books, and reads as an exhilarating and extremely rich filmic sequence. Suter’s interest lies not only in the iconographic value of images and the way that the human brain processes visual information, but also the causes by which images become charged with associative values. The book is a collection of possible future histories.

Holes and Silence

The archive does not tell stories; only secondary narratives give meaningful coherence to its discontinuous elements. In its very discreteness the archive mirrors the operative level of the present, calculating rather than telling. In the archive, nothing and nobody ‘speaks’ to us – neither the dead not anything else. The archive is a storage agency in spatial architecture. Let us not confuse public discourse (which turns data into narratives) with the silence of discrete archival files. There is no necessary coherent connection between archival data and documents, but rather gaps in between: holes and silence.

The Globe's Ocean of Humans and their Environment

At its heart Neue Welt is not really about anything that it depicts, and it is not about its author or his connection with those things. It is about a world so large and confused that it cannot be reliably imagined, imaged, believed, or dreamed. This book is about confusion, about being lost in the globe’s ocean of humans and their environments, which although a feeling belonging initially to the author, is here so purely and passionately represented that the image-maker has left himself behind. He has transcended himself, which, after emerging from Neue Welt, makes his accomplishment all the more impressive.

Documentary is not a Tradition

There is no such thing as documentary – whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach or a set of techniques. This assertion – as old and as fundamental as the antagonism between names and reality – needs incessantly to be restated, despite the very visible existence of a documentary tradition.

Complexity of Things

The modern times ask to consider all the layers that stick to the flat surface of an image. But it is not natural to see an image as a complexity of things yet. An easy way of looking at only the surface of an image is more common, but I believe that this is not the way to go. The image is rich. And that’s the great thing about it that makes it so exciting.

Ola lankostatementhttp://olalanko.com/#/statement.14 November 2015

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Polyhedron

Often, there is still a holistic view while looking at the image. People see it as a whole, an entity of depicted objects, situations, events or people that are organized in an artificial setting, bordered by the picture frame. I think that such an approach to an image doesn’t do any good to our understanding of it. I prefer to think of an image as a polyhedron, a structure that consists of numerous elements and facets, both visible in the image, and invisible such as those that are made by context, individual experience and cultural heritage and it can be perceived from numerous perspectives.

Ola Lankostatementhttp://olalanko.com/#/statement.14 November 2015

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Entity

Look not to the entity in isolation to know what it is, but rather look outward to the field of entities, the ecology of beings, that the entity interacts with. The color of an entity is not in an entity, though it does take place in an entity, but rather it’s as if all beings are citational, referencing beings other than themselves.

Levi BryantKnots: For an Interactivist Ontologyhttps://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/pdfbryantswedeninteractivism2015.pdf.21 November 2015

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Answers Kill Angels

I wanted to know how they were made. I really, badly needed to know. I knew what he would say. I knew it from his failure to offer the information as we went through the prints. And it knew it wasn’t done to ask. Finally, when against my better judgment I did, it took me a full six months to forget the answer that he so reluctantly gave. The prints definitely had more to do with angels than with the worldy objects that had made them. Though I know how the fabric of Garry Fabian Miller’s pictures are made – I also know that it is not important to know. The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes until they become transparent.”

Newton's Letter

In an few hours I had brought my eyes to such a pass that I could like upon no bright object with either eye but I saw the sun before me, so that I durst neither write nor read but to recover the use of my eyes shut myself up in my chamber made dark for three days together and used all means to divert my imagination from the Sun. For if I thought upon him I presently saw his picture though I was in the dark. But by keeping in the dark and employing my mind about other things I began in three or four days to have some use of my eyes again and by forbearing a few days longer to look upon bright objects recovered them pretty well, though not so well but that for some months after the spectrum of the Sun began to return as often as I began to meditate upon the phenomenom, even though I lay in bed at midnight with my curtains drawn.

Marc de KeselWelkom in Wonderlandhttps://marcdekesel.weebly.com/uploads/2/4/4/4/24446416/welkom_in_wonderland_-_over_zin_bij_deleuze_-_versie_boek.pdf7 November 2015

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Neue Welt

Wolfgang Tillmans’ Neue Welt (New World) is littered with diverse images that are fearlessly juxtaposed. On the surface they seem to examine and reveal nothing, but through a complex interplay of abstraction and fanatic attention to themes and details, Tillmans weaves an intricate web of relation [...]Throughout this explosion of images, Tillmans seems to know exactly what to do with each and every one. There is a very careful eye at work in these pages, and the photographs mesh even though they shouldn’t. They are layered on top of each other, stacked horizontally and vertically, and placed from page to page in a way that seems natural in its effortlessness.

Half-Language

Between the moment recorded and the present moment of looking at the photograph, there is an abyss [...] the very same discontinuity, by preserving an instantaneous set of appearances, allows us to read across them and to find a synchronic coherence. A coherence which, instead of narrating, instigates ideas. Appearances have this coherent capacity because they constitute something approaching a language. I have referred to this as a half -language.

John Berger and Jean MohrAnother way of telling New YorkPantheon Books1982

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Observation

Observation is a never-ending series of ‘non-decisive moments’, full of potential for anyone who is open to see it.

PaulGraham as cited by: Bint Photobooks on Internet a shimmer of possibilityhttp://bintphotobooks.blogspot.com/2010/04/shimmer-of-possibility-paul-graham.html21 October 2015

Fig. 69

When 16-year-old Palestinian, Aamer Alfar, blew hemself up in a Tel-Aviv market on 1st November, 2004, this leaf was propelled to the ground by the force of the explosion. Trees empty of their leaves are a common sight around the vicinity of such attacks.

Seeing

When we see, we are doing many things at once, We are seeing a enormous field peripherally. We are seeing in an up-to-down left-to-right movement. We are imposing on what we are isolating in our field of vision not only implied axes to adjust balance but also a structural map to chart and measure the action of the compositional forces that are so vital to content and, therefore, to message input and output. All this is happening while at the same time we are decoding all manner of symbols.

Donis A. DondisA Primer of Visual LiteracyMA: The MIT press

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Reading News

We’re trained to read so conventionally, that gallery visitors felt that they had to read every single word. Most walked in, saw the task that lay before them and walked right out. My idea, however, was less conventional. I was more interested in the idea of skimming as a way to get our information. I mean, how many people read the daily newspaper from front to back, in the correct order, not missing a word? Very few. However, we still manage to get the news we need.

Kenneth Goldsmith‘I look to theory only when I realize that somebody has dedicated their entire life to a question I have only fleetingly considered (a work in progress)’http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/goldsmith/25 October 2015

What do you see?

I showed him the cover, an unbroken expanse of Sahara dunes.

‘What do you see here?’ I asked.

‘I see a river,’ he said. ‘And a little guesthouse with its terrace on the water. People are dining out on the terrace. I see coloured parasols here and there.’ He was looking, if it was ‘looking’, right off the cover, into mid-air, and confabulating non-existent features, as if the absence of features in the actual picture had driven him to imagine the river and the terrace and the coloured parasols.

I must have looked aghast, but he seemed to think he had done rather well. There was a hint of a smile on his face. He also appeared to have decided the examination was over, and started to look round for his hat. He reached out his hand, and took hold of his wife’s head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat! His wife looked as if she was used to such things.

Oliver SacksThe Man Who Mistook His Wife For A HatUKGerald Duckworth1985

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Modernism - Postmodernism

Modernism tore up unity and postmodernism has been enjoying the shreds

Phantoms

[f]renzied confabulatory delirium…such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment. We have, each of us, a life story, an inner narrative–whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives…and this narrative is us, our identities… A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self. [But Mr. Thompson,] deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy–hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania. Unable to maintain a genuine narrative or continuity, unable to maintain a genuine inner world, he is driven to the proliferation of pseudo narratives, in a pseudo continuity, pseudo-worlds peopled by pseudo-people, phantoms.

Oliver SacksThe The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A HatUK Pan Macmillan2015

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Common Myths

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.

Yuval Noah HarariSapiens: A Brief History of HumankindUKVintage2016

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Simulacrum

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Sapiens

The truly unique trait of ‘Sapiens’ is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities.

Yuval Noah HarariSapiens: A Brief History of HumankindUKVintage 2015

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Å

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly EverythingDublinTransworld Publishers Ltd2016

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Neuronal Choreography

My perception of the world around me, as cognitive neuroscience teaches us, is synthesized within different regions of my brain. What I call reality results from the integrated sum of countless stimuli collected through my five senses, brought from the outside into my head via my nervous system. Cognition, the awareness of being here now, is a fabrication of a vast set of chemicals flowing through myriad synaptic connections between my neurons. … We have little understanding as to how exactly this neuronal choreography engenders us with a sense of being. We go on with our everyday activities convinced that we can separate ourselves from our surroundings and construct an objective view of reality.

Marcelo GleiserThe Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for MeaningUS INGRAM PUBLISHER 2015

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Humility

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only
very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.

Albert EinsteinThe Island of Knowledge: Science and the Meaning of Lifehttps://fs.blog/2016/10/the-island-of-knowledge/2 November 2018

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Specialists

I see artists as ‘specialists’ in identifying meaning, in transforming and attributing it, generally in visual form.

Made by Stef Kors, Titus Knegtel, Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou with the kind support of the Creative Industries Fund NL and Stroom Den Haag.

About

oneacre.online is an experimental publishing & distribution project that utilises an online platform to seed unprintable text-based works by emerging artists. The project explores the possibilities of hyper-publishing in a series of four commissioned publications.

Thematically oneacre.online first four commissioned publications by all female art practitioners, place themselves in the online world of constant updates and refresh buttons that, as theorist Wendy Chun observes, “exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same”. The publications use the omnidirectional online terrain and actions that are native to it — such as refreshing, instantly available to edit, easily erasable, highlighting, copy-pasting and non linear navigation — to explore and critically evaluate visions and versions of power systems by tracing the politics of technological infrastructures. Hidden in places as traditional as archives, as often used as smart phone applications, omnipresent and inescapable as the financial market and as quiet and evasive as the transfer of information in narrative structures.